Growing Up on the Gridiron

by Vicki Mayk

  Marc was not the only athlete laying the groundwork for the rest of his playing career. Starting in middle school, Owen did what few players manage, playing both offense and defense as a fullback and linebacker. He also began fulfilling another role that his teammates would come to expect from him in years ahead: that of self-appointed motivator who would encourage other players, urging them to give their best. His encouragement could be gentle. On the first day in the middle school weight room, Mike Parkhill watched as his longtime friend easily did reps lifting 135 pounds. Trying to bench 95 pounds, Mike was nearly crushed by the bar. Owen calmly walked over to him. “Don’t worry, Park; everyone’s gotta start somewhere,” Owen said. Mike Parkhill remembered the moment on Owen’s birthday, five years after his friend died, and commemorated it on his Facebook page.

  Mike Fay says, “Owen got to be the best kid on the team as a seventh grader. No matter how old he was, he was always the best. In middle school, we saw him as a leader—but I didn’t want to let him know that.”

  Football was not the only thing drawing their attention as they entered middle school.

  Cheerleaders had been around since the boys began playing youth football, when even peewee teams had their own cheering squad. At that age, the girls were merely part of the landscape at games. In junior high, their presence came into sharper focus as the boys naturally became more aware of the opposite sex. Although girls had been guaranteed equal access to opportunities to play sports after the passage of Title IX in 1972, Parkland had no female football players during the years Owen and his friends were Trojans. It was very much the traditional separation of boys on the field, girls on the sidelines cheering them on.

  Owen had met Abbie and Jess Benner before they became middle-school classmates. His brother, Morgan, was friends with their older brother, Nick. The girls are twins—not identical, but very nearly alike in appearance and stature. The sisters are friendly and chatty, sometimes finishing each other’s sentences. Jess and Abbie’s good friend, Emily Toth, was also a cheerleader and had known Owen since elementary school. Soon he became a welcome fourth wheel when the three girls congregated after school.

  “We were the same age, so then we went into middle school together. . . . And then we just clicked. Right away, we hung out,” Abbie says.

  Jess interjects, “All the time.”

  Abbie laughs. “All the time!”

  Although the toughest of players, Owen became a different person off the field—the kind of guy that girls quickly adopt as a friend. He often joined the three girls at one of their houses to spend hours playing Dance Dance Revolution, a popular Japanese arcade game that introduced a home video game version in the late 1990s. Players at home stepped on a plastic mat in patterns corresponding to arrows appearing on the video game screen. Steps were done to the beat of music, and players were rated on the accuracy of the series of steps they executed making up their “dance.” Owen was competitive even when playing a video dance game, always striving to win. The girls frequently dissolved into laughter at the intensity of the competition.

  “He was our protector,” Abbie recalls. “He was always there. He always looked out for us.”

  Despite his reputation as everyone’s buddy, Owen developed an early romantic interest in Abbie.

  “When we were in sixth grade—do you really count that? We were technically boyfriend and girlfriend for a little bit, but I don’t know how much dating you do in sixth grade. We were together for a little bit,” Abbie says, blushing.

  The crush that started in middle school never diminished for Owen, even though both would go on to date others, before rekindling their relationship in high school.

  The year that the boys were in eighth grade, the middle school team went undefeated. By the end of the season, they also had the distinction of having no points scored against them. In the final game of that season, against Easton at Cottingham Stadium, Owen established himself as an aggressive player who comes through at a critical juncture in the game.

  “Owen was running the ball, and he’s coming up the sideline and there’s one guy that tried to tackle him. And boom! He hit him! And then another guy, and he hit that guy. And then a third guy,” Steckel recalls. “It was just a classic run. It’s something we practiced, but you never thought you’d actually see it done to that extent.” They lost the game on an intercepted pass—the season’s only loss.

  In fall 2002, as Owen Thomas and the Parkland players were eighth graders, playing on an undefeated middle school football team, they were preparing to do what they’d dreamt of doing since they first suited up on a peewee team: play high school football. Football was forever and none of them could imagine the future without it. It was the thing they loved the most.

  As it did for the Parkland boys, football became part of Mike Webster’s life from an early age. Long before Webster became a Hall of Fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, his father remembered him watching the Green Bay Packers as a child and saying he’d play for the team someday. Later, at Rhinelander High School in rural Oneida County, Wisconsin, he played football for the Hodags—named for a mythical Northwoods creature. The game became an escape from the grueling work on his father’s potato farm and, later, a family business digging water wells. Webster would take castoffs, like pieces of pipe from the well business, and turn them into strength-training equipment. He was lifting twice a day by the time he was a senior in high school.5

  Going on to play for the University of Wisconsin Badgers, he anchored the team’s offensive line and was captain as a senior. His rigorous weight training would help earn him accolades as the Big Ten’s best center. He was drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers because of his hard-hitting play and quickness, but he was considered small for an offensive lineman in the NFL at six feet, two-and-a-half inches, and 225 pounds. At the end of his rookie season, when the Steelers won the first Super Bowl in the team’s history, he vowed to return bigger and stronger. When he checked into training camp the next August, he weighed in between 250 and 260 pounds. It was the result of a regimen of weight gain and “bulking up” that even younger players on the high school level often are urged to emulate in the pursuit of being bigger and stronger on the field.

  Although Webster later admitted to some steroid use before the drugs were outlawed, his increased mass also could be attributed to a training schedule that most described as obsessive. It included off-season powerlifting with guys who could bench press five hundred pounds. At home, he did lunges with a barbell behind his head in the snow in his backyard, where he also kept a blocking sled for off-season workouts at 6 a.m.6

  During a sixteen-year professional career, he earned the nickname Iron Mike. From his sophomore year in high school until he ended his career playing for the Kansas City Chiefs, he estimated that he’d played three hundred out of his teams’ three hundred games. There were other reasons for the nickname.

  Webster was known for using his head as a weapon, driving it into opponents as he came off the line. Over the years, a visible layer of scar tissue built up at the spot where his helmet pushed into advancing linemen. Yet there were only two references related to head injuries in his medical records during his playing career, and there were no diagnosed concussions. Part of Webster’s legend as Iron Mike included an incident when he checked himself out of the hospital to go play at Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Stadium. As it was for most players, playing through pain was a badge of honor.7

  When he walked away from football at age thirty-eight, it was as if he walked away from life. The twelve years after his 1990 retirement were a slow unraveling, as if football had somehow held it all together and, without it, life fell apart. There were mood swings, angry outbursts, bankruptcy. It was reported that he’d sold his Super Bowl rings. His marriage ended. At one point Webster was living in his car. His health had deteriorated, and he was charged with forging prescriptions for the drug Ritalin, which he used to help him focus. In 2002, he was hospitalized for a heart atta
ck. After surgery for two blocked arteries, his body, subjected to so much trauma on the playing field, began to shut down. He died at age fifty.8

  A Steelers fan working in the coroner’s office brought Webster’s case to the attention of Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian doctor working there who had been mentored by legendary Allegheny County coroner Cyril Wecht. Wecht had made a name for himself by weighing in on celebrity deaths and had advanced the idea that John F. Kennedy had not been killed by a lone gunman. Like his mentor, Omalu was brilliant and flamboyant, a doctor who wore expensive suits and who boasted a long list of degrees and credentials. Besides his medical degree, he’d earned a master’s degree in public health and an MBA. He had fellowship training in forensic pathology and neuropathology.9 Football players were outside of Omalu’s frame of reference, and he famously asked, “Who’s Mike Webster?” when his colleague asked him to perform the autopsy. Everything seemed routine, but Omalu decided to ask Wecht for permission to study the brain in more depth. In examining it, he found an unusual buildup of tau protein. It was the kind of buildup found in boxers that went with the condition called “dementia pugilistica,” or “punch-drunk syndrome.” Omalu knew he had discovered something important. He sought confirmation of his diagnosis from two renowned neuropathologists at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Dr. Ronald Hamilton and Dr. Steve DeKosky. Omalu had studied with Hamilton. DeKosky headed UPMC’s Department of Neurology. Both men corroborated Omalu’s findings. He named the condition that he had discovered “chronic traumatic encephalopathy.” Later, it would be abbreviated as CTE. The findings were reported in a July 2005 article titled “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player” in the journal Neurosurgery.10

  Omalu thought it would be deemed a groundbreaking discovery by the medical community. He naively thought it would be embraced by the National Football League. But what Omalu did not initially realize was that the discovery would also be important to boys playing middle school football.

  CHAPTER 5

  FOOTBALL BOYS

  THE SUN BURNS OFF the early-morning haze leaving a blanket of August heat hanging over the practice fields. The Parkland High School Trojans exit the locker room in a wave, trotting across the parking lots that separate the high school from the practice fields. Cleats clack on hot black macadam as they approach three descending, green-terraced fields bordering busy Cedar Crest Boulevard.

  Summer is short for high school football players. Less than two months separate the end of the school year in June from preseason practice in August. For the dedicated ones, there really is no break. The summer months are spent conditioning in the weight room to ensure being in the best possible shape when practice starts again. There’s no room for much else. Working a summer job, maybe, or playing video games and hanging out with the guys. Those things come behind lifting, workouts, and, eventually, preseason practice.

  Workouts that had seemed insurmountable in middle school were almost welcome now. For players like Owen and his friends, it was a privilege to be part of the summertime ritual of off-season conditioning and drills in ninety-degree heat. He and his friends had watched older brothers, friends, and neighbors play as Parkland Trojans. When it was their turn, they savored it all.

  The team held preseason practice every weekday in August from 8 a.m. to noon under the unforgiving summer sun. During the years that Owen and his friends were Trojans, two-a-days were part of the regimen. It meant daily practice time was doubled, with players returning to continue the workouts in the stifling late afternoon heat.

  The tradition of two-a-days has disappeared from many high school football programs—although many, particularly in the South, still cling to the practice. Limiting full contact to just one of the two practices is becoming standard. (Contact practices are those in which tackling and hitting are part of the routine.) Two-a-days were banished in 2011 under the NFL collective bargaining agreement because some felt it had become almost a form of professional hazing.1 The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in 2017 decreed that only walk-throughs—no contact or conditioning, no helmets and pads—would be permitted at second practices held the same day. Even then, three hours had to separate the two practices, to give players time to recover.2 At Parkland High School in 2006, two-a-days were routine, a part of the football culture to be both endured and savored.

  Summer practices for the Trojans followed a pattern as carefully planned and well-executed as military drills. First came training supervised by the special teams coordinator—ten minutes in the morning, with ten minutes in the afternoon during double sessions. In that brief time, skills were polished for game kickoffs, punting, and kicking for the extra point in a field goal.

  Players, more than a hundred of them, were broken into three groups. Freshmen, clad in black jerseys, practiced together on a field adjacent to the busy road that runs by the high school. Varsity and junior varsity players in red jerseys spent time on the neighboring fields working on individual skills before coming together for group and teamwork later.

  Coaches barked directions at lagging runners. Players chanted as they rotated to the next drill: “One, two, three, crap!” Bodies thudded, making contact with tackling dummies, the hits punctuated by guttural grunts. Underscoring it all was the subtle hum of insects in the tall grass ringing the field, like a chorus of ghostly fans.

  On the middle practice field, running backs and receivers engaged in drills. A boy ran, caught a pass, rolled to the ground and sprang to his feet, moving seamlessly in a choreographed dance that became part of body memory.

  In the field dubbed “the hole”—so named because it is the lowest of the three practice fields—linemen worked on fundamentals of offensive and defensive play. They took turns pushing against sleds, a piece of equipment shaped like a snow sled standing upright. It allowed them to refine the moves needed to drive back opponents. Later players might face off against each other or run at tackling dummies.

  “It’s gotta come from you,” exhorted one of the line coaches. “Me standing here yelling like a fucking idiot is not going to do it. It’s got to come from you.”

  Under his admonitions, players picked up the pace. In the center field, they practiced an intricate drill of cutting and running. “Hard right, soft left,” a coach intoned. Players moved almost hypnotically to his chanted directions. A big kid wielding a camera ran between groups of players capturing their moves for later analysis. At regular intervals, someone ordered, “Go take a drink,” a safeguard against dangerous dehydration. Players refreshed themselves from the arc of water streaming from a black hose at the edge of the field.

  Standing on a hill overlooking it all, head coach Jim Morgans studied the action with the concentration of a general watching troop movements in times of war. Sometimes he uttered words of praise—“Good one!” Other times, he was the disciplinarian: “Don’t talk back to me. I get enough of that from my kids.” Graying, sporting a dab of a goatee in the center of his chin, he strode across the field in shorts, a baseball cap shielding his eyes from the sun.

  Morgans was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a small, gritty city in the coal regions north of the affluent Pennsylvania suburb where he coached. His father worked for the Central Railroad of New Jersey, known as the Jersey Central, on the trains hauling coal from the mines in northeastern Pennsylvania to where it was distributed in Philadelphia and New Jersey. Catholic school was a given for Jim and his siblings, who belonged to a family of devout Catholics. Also a given: he would transfer to Wilkes-Barre’s public E. L. Meyers High School when he was old enough, so he could play football. Morgans’s father had followed the same path in his youth. A picture frame hangs in Coach Morgans’s house, which he points to with pride. It contains four photos: One is of his father, in a football jersey—W-B for Wilkes-Barre in giant letters on the front. The other three photos are of Morgans and his two sons, Billy and Jimmy, all taken in uniform at various stages of their playing careers. Morgans, like
many of his players, is part of a family of football players.

  Morgans began playing after his family moved south to Allentown, in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, due to his father’s railroad work. The younger Morgans was a lineman for Allentown Central Catholic High School’s Vikings. From that time, football governed his life choices. West Texas State University lured him to Cisco Junior College, now Cisco College, to play with the thought that he’d move on to the university after two years. But another offer, from Louisiana College, a Baptist school in Pineville, Louisiana, drew him to play for its Wildcats team. Morgans’s record there would earn him a place in the school’s athletic hall of fame.

  During his college years, Morgans’s roommate was an African American football player named John Love. On team trips, players sometimes went to the movies on free nights. It was the 1960s, and segregation was still a reality in the South, so Black players were consigned to sit in the balcony while their white teammates could sit on the main floor of the theater. Morgans joined John Love in the balcony. After graduation, Morgans taught briefly at a southern high school, but missed home and returned north. Soon after joining the faculty at his alma mater, Allentown Central Catholic, he began his coaching career. It had an inauspicious start, for his first seven years at the school. But after leaving Central Catholic and working with other head coaches at Muhlenberg College and Parkland, Morgans returned to Central a seasoned coach. In a memorable ten-season run, between 1989 and 1998, Morgans led Central Catholic to a 94–20 record, with six District 11 championships and five East Penn Conference crowns. It cemented his reputation as a top coach. Including his earlier stint at the school from 1976 to 1981, Morgans compiled an overall 115–76–1 record at Central Catholic.3